The Tavern

Now, you might be thinking there's loads of ways to die in meatsprint ( http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Arena_of_Blood ), but here are some especially amusing ones I have found while failing to win it.

1. Lose before you start by being a non-formicid fighter and getting smeared all over the landscape while taking off the shield.
2. Forget to pick up the Axe of Woe, and realise when you try and punch a bag of meat to death, which doesn't work very well.
3. Forget to wield the Axe of Woe. Theoretically you can save this one because the first thing you attack might miss its counterattack (Spoiler: it didn't.)
4. Forget to worship Makhleb. Defeat the first few monsters, come on, god, you can start handing out healing... ah.
5. Stat gains at level-up require capital letters now, a nice UI improvement - unless you are gaining several levels at once and press D one too many times. You have now dropped the Axe of Woe. Hilarity ensues.
6. With the Axe it doesn't matter what your primary target is, everything gets cleaved to death, so you may as well just press Tab, right? Not if you are very low on health and have a large bag of meat next to you. It turns out you take the damage from the explosion before Makhleb heals you. Probably should have gone for a bag of meat instead.

7. The first monster you see is a meat berserker. Your last run got quite a long way and you have largely stopped caring that they are fast. Once again, it transpires, you care that they are fast.

8. I think I tried a few times digging into the walls with a formicid, but some of the monsters also can dig if they want to.

Oh, yes. You can live quite a long time like that, especially if you dig behind the stone edifice they all teleport into. That's how I came to try learning the starting books. Unfortunately, of course, when you come back out you have used so many turns that the arena is now entirely full of bastards.

On reflection, I thought that http://crawl.montres.org.uk/morgue/dame ... 192754.txt was quite a pleasing way to end a meatsprint game.